WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

DESCRIBE ABOUT HISTORY OF C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

•       C programming language is a structured programming language, developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972.

•       C language features have been derived from an earlier language called "B" (Basic Combined Programming Language – BCPL).

•       In earlier days, the programs were written in assembly level languages. So, it happened that very large programs were written to perform specific tasks using assembly code.

•       But the 'B' language could perform the same task in a few program lines, and it was faster than the assembly of the language code.

•       However, the B language did not support certain features such as data types and structures, etc. So, this was a drawback to the B language. Dennis Ritchie developed C by keeping most of the B-language and adding many features that produced powerful and effective outputs.

•       So, the C language was invented to implement the UNIX operating system. Most of the UNIX components have been rewritten in C.

•       In 1978, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan published the first edition of The C Programming Language, commonly known as K&R C.

•       In 1983, the American National Standards Institute ( ANSI) set up a committee to provide a modern, comprehensive definition of C. The resulting definition, ANSI or "ANSI C," was completed at the end of 1988.

•       Standard C89 / C90 – The first standardized C-language specification was developed by the American National Standards Institute in 1989. The standards C89 and C90 refer to the same programming language.

•       Standard C99 – The next revision was published in 1999 that introduced new futures such as advanced data types and other changes.

•       C11 standard adds new features to C and library, such as generic macro types, anonymous structures, enhanced Unicode support, atomic operations, multi-threading, and bound-checked functions. It also makes some parts of the existing C99 library optional and improves compatibility with C++.

Embedded C includes features not available in normal C, such as fixed-point arithmetic, named address spaces, and basic I / O hardware address.

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